Giantesses

Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me
by Craig Seligman
2004, Counterpoint

Illness as Metaphor
by Susan Sontag
1978, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
by Pauline Kael
1968, Atlantic Little Brown

Both Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael are figures who have acted as intellectual paragons for most of my adult life. Both were strong women who influenced a generation of writers who followed behind them, both held as the standard of their genres by which others would be judges, both interested in the arts. I don't remember the first time I heard of Kael, nor do I remember the first of her writing I read. I do, however, remember first becoming familiar with the persona of Susan Sontag in the aftermath of her (rather incendiary) comments regarding 9/11 when I was sixteen years old.

I also remember the first piece of Sontag's I actually read as a film student in college: a lengthy thicket-like discussion of Bergman's Persona. Sontag's prose was intimidating, frankly. While I admires the precise machinations of her mind, I had no desire to subject myself to another investigation of its depths; I was content to stick with more superficial writing on film - reviews, for example, which are rewarding for their brevity and easily consumable viewpoints against which I might frequently hone the strength of my own intellect. The reviews I read frequently cited Kael and her supposedly divisive and caustic reviews but with few exceptions I was entirely unfamiliar with her work.

Around Christmastime this past year I was shopping at a wonderful knick-knack/curio store in Lowell called Found. I like shopping at Found because of the endless supply of kitschy and often non-functional supply of dated decor and unique oddball items - and also for the brief, but wonderful exchanges with the gay couple who operate it and are some of the people I've met whose minds are as cluttered with popcultural flotsam as mine (on this particular day we managed to hold court on The Puppetland Band, Annie Ross' acting career and Basket Case).

In the back of the store is a small bookcase of some choice books (almost none are novels), collected seemingly at random. It was there I found a copy of Craig Seligman's Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me and took it home as a Christmas gift to myself. It was another month or two before I was able to sit down and read it.

Sontag & Kael is not a biography so much as an auto-biography, of sorts. While there is personal history about each of its subjects - Sontag's difficult relationship with her lesbianism, for example, or Kael's rivalries with her contemporaries (namely, Andrew Sarris) - the book reveals far more about Mr. Seligman and his intellectual development than anything else. The book takes the form of a lengthy critical analysis and consequently discusses major thematic preoccupations of each writer as well as their distinctive stylistic divergences.

Seligman examines at length Sontag's crystalline, precise, endlessly objective prose and his admiration for the cleanliness, the orderliness of her thinking is at odds with his distaste for the coldness, the distance of her prose. For Seligman, Sontag's prose is to be admired, not adored. He is particularly taken with her tendency to lay out all possible conclusions in a laborious Socratic method for proving her point. This technique, with its continuous qualifications of her thought processes, hold him at arms-length and yet appeals to him in what it reveals about her insecurity in the self-evidence of her ideas.

For Seligman, a writer like Kael is personally preferable. Kael's prose is effervescent and seemingly effortless. Kael's writing seems off the cuff in its spontaneity and wonderful expressiveness of ideas; her wit seems natural, unlike Sontag's obviously labored prose. However, Seligman also mentions a personal relationship with Kael which began during his stint as a fact checker for the New Yorker, where Kael reviewed for the brunt of her career. As though to make up for this personal bias, Seligman spends a great deal of his space on Kael with a heavy critical hand.

Despite his retrospective criticism of Kael's inconsistency, Seligman builds a description of his attraction to Kael's acerbic criticism that makes his book ultimately incredibly compelling. At one point, he writes about how seeing films for him began as an opportunity to test Kael's reviews against his own experiences; eventually, however, he began to read Kael instead of seeing the films, her glib summaries of their plots sufficing for the often drab experience of seeing the films. Seligman even recounts his ability to associate certain reviews - Nashville, for example - with where he read that issue of the New Yorker. This admission couches the book in fondly nostalgic tones that are tempered by Seligman's rather intricate exploration of key works of each writer.

Seligman's relationship with Kael's prose gets to the heart of what is so intensely lovable about her writing. After reading his book, I ran to my bookcase and found a very old used copy of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang that I had purchased as a junior at BU from the used basement of the Brookline Booksmith (which used to house the now-closed Cinemasmith).

In reading Kael's book, which ranges from actor profiles to reviews to cinematic trends, I too fell in love with Kael's insightful, deliciously witty prose. As a reviewer, Kael was unforgiving, wonderful, blunt. She was utterly unimpressed by films she was "supposed" to like - Oscar bait, sleepy art films (she was particularly unforgiving about Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad). She was likewise prone to defending, as Seligman refers to it, trash pictures - cult films, which is where Sontag and Kael most closely intersect orbits (in Sontag's genre-defining essay "Notes on 'Camp'") and yet Kael's perspective is not simply one of an reactionary contrarian. Kael is a more deliciously shrewd filmgoer than I could ever be; her dismissal of supposedly great works (and here I have film history's hindsight on my side) is thrilling in its irreverence.

Kael's eye was not trained simply for exposing hacks. Her essays on film trends are uncannily modern. Her essay, for example, on the aestheticization of violence in Bonnie and Clyde could have been written just easily about Quentin Tarantino's ultraviolent, quippily cool masterpieces. Or her essay on heavily ironic "quirky" college-friendly films (she references a film called Georgy Girl in this piece, entitled "So Off-Beat We Lose the Beat") which leaves me wondering how different her take on Wes Anderson, say, or Jason Reitman would have been had she lived to see their films.

But the true beauty of Kael's is in her seemingly tossed-off descriptions that perfectly encapsulate an actor's spark or a film's charm. A large portion of these bon mots are gathered in a collection of her capsule reviews at the back of the collection, where she boils entire films down to a perfect gem of description. Take, for instance, this comment, regarding the unnatural dialogue in All About Eve: "The synthetic has qualities of its own - glib, over-explicit, self-important, the You're-sneaky-and-corrupt-but-so-am-I-We-belong-to-each-other-darling style of writing" or her observation regarding Greta Garbo's performance in Camille: "She is a divinity trying to succeed as a whore."

Kael's book was a charm to get through despite its heft (nearly four hundred pages). Sontag's relatively slender volume (eighty-seven pages) I assumed would be a struggle; based on my undergraduate experience with Sontag's writing on film, I found the slimmest Sontag work I could find at the Methuen library, 1978's Illness as Metaphor. I was surprised to find the book equally engaging and easily digested.

The conceit of Illness as Metaphor is ostensibly an exploration of the mythologization of tuberculosis and cancer in popular and literary culture. Sontag discusses in the early half of the book the role tuberculosis has played in expressing character development in mostly nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works; Henry James's The Wings of the Dove and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain figure prominently.

Tuberculosis, as Sontag describes it, is used mainly to identify characters who are passive and refuse to engage in the world around them, in contrast to healthier, more active characters. TB-afflicted characters are prone to self-doubt and inward-ness and as such cloister themselves in order to disengage for the world. Sontag takes issue with the utilization of illness to express character psychology because of the danger it has in transferring its easy stereotyping to the world at large and as a precursor to the "peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease."

The second half of the book revolves around the intrusion of cancer terminology in modern thought and writing, from sociological texts to militaristic propaganda, an act that likens disease to "invasion" and other fundamentally distasteful modern problems. It seems to me though, that it is unclear in her writing whether she is alleging that doctors have co-opted military phraseology into their description of cancer or vice-versa. Either way, it is a compelling case for the de-humanization of the cancer patient, who is treated as though afflicted by a foreign entity and is thus transformed, as opposed to the more humanistic approach of allowing a cancer patient to maintain his identity (much was made of this work because of Sontag's own battle with cancer).

Perhaps hindsight here too is working against me in that I live in a culture whose appreciation of cancer is more Terms of Endearment than Estrangement. However, the use of cancer as a screenwriting crutch to endanger young love (A Walk to Remember) or improve strained familial relations (The Family Stone) or generally inject a healthy dose of pathos (Funny People) still tends to turn the disease into a rough caricature, a symbol, a quickest-means to the end. Sontag's insights are clearly still at the least tenable and possibly applicable to our understanding of the cultural attitudes towards cancer.

Sontag's prose proved far less thorny than in my memory. Seligman remarks at length of her effort to clarify her thoughts without simplifying them and thus condescending to her audience. If Seligman was referring to Illness as Metaphor, it is not immediately obvious to me what challenge the argument would have for an adult. Her discussion is easy to follow, incredibly logical, and the reference points are no longer outside my frame of reference. Compared to Kael's seemingly improvised jokes and cutting insights, Sontag's writing is at dry, at the very least. But while her methodology might not be as immediately rewarding as Kael's, it is not confusing and it ultimately gives great satisfaction. Her prose is dry but her ideas practically crackle with energy.

While Mr. Seligman has chosen for his attention two seemingly unconnected subjects (the book, after all, is subtitled Opposites Attract Me), he has also effectively portrayed each in terms of her intellectual achievements. I am happy to see that each merited further investigation on my part, an experience that yielded appreciation. With both Sontag and Kael it was easy to trace the relevance of their thought to my own intellectual development; their cultural relevance should not have been surprising considering their considerable cache but, delightfully, it was.